Sam Altman's Call for Urgent AI Ethics Discussion

0:00Welcome to the podcast lately if you go on X or LinkedIn or basically any social media platform you hear a hundred people talking about perhaps the ways that AI is going to end all of humanity and you know whether it is or isn't and there's just massive argument going on right now a lot of this came from Dario on the day who in response to a quote-unquote whistleblower which I've covered on the podcast in the past came out with a with a piece called we must paste the frontier basically saying that he wanted to slow down the development of artificial intelligence so that we could make it safe now there's pros and cons to a lot of the different arguments he covers in here I'll talk about a couple of them but before we get into that I think today on the show I just want to show all sides of this argument and why I don't believe slowing down the development of AI and the pace of development is the correct answer and it's really interesting and really kind of a weird time because I feel like there's sort of this weird political divide on this argument but at the same time a lot of people from different

1:00sides of the political spectrum are a line on both sides of this argument so it's just like a really weird interesting time I'll get through all of the tweets there is a ton basically everyone is digging into this and I'll get through some stories of some people and some things that I'm working on and some other stuff like that before I do though I wanted to mention if you want the ability to test out the top 90 different AI models in one place without having to get subscriptions to all those different platforms I'd love for you to check out my own startup which is called AIbox.ai we let you have a single chat interface where you can get all of the image audio video text and even music models all in one place so you can generate all of that type of AI content you can test out all of the different models in one spot so you can switch from talking to Claude to chat to PT to Gemini to Groc all the same conversation you can have open AI generate images inside of that then you can have Google V03 generate video you can have 11 Lads generate audio all inside the same chat thread it's incredibly useful if you want to try it out it's only $8.99

2:00a month to get started it is AIbox.ai I'll leave a link to it in the description we're super excited with the progress we've been seeing here okay let's talk about this first of all the blog posts that kind of kicked off I think the big argument here because it started out with a someone who went and worked at Anthropic for I think like six weeks or something like that he wasn't like an executive or anything here's one worked at Anthropic for six weeks he made a tweet that said you know Anthropic and Open AI and everyone else was gambling with our lives because self and you know self improving AI was getting too good that it could make bio weapons and kind of wipe out all of humanity this tweet went mega viral on X with over 700,000 last I checked it probably close to a million by now because a few days ago likes on the tweet and so a lot of people are talking about this he then went on a press tour on every kind of mainstream news site CNN and all the rest of it telling people that AI was a massive danger this is going right in at the same time that I believe next week we have Bernie Sanders coming out with a bill to quote unquote ban super intelligent AI and impose a 20 year prison sentence to any developer that is caught developing this you know advanced AI systems so there's a lot at stake and there's a lot politically that's moving in this but what's interesting is I don't really find this is something that's kind of like Republican versus Democrat although it seems like there's some there are some political you know obviously Bernie Sanders is a Democrat so there are some politics to it but we do have Democrats coming over to the acceleration side and we have Republicans going over to the deceleration side so I would say it's not super

3:29clean and clear cut in that regard and there's a much more nuanced conversation that has to be had about all this but before we get into all of the exciting drama of that let's talk about some of the tweets and the very first thing that I wanted to mention is after Dario came out with this we had Elon Musk say yep let's slow it down we had some Altman say yes let's slow down we had the head of Google say okay let's slow it down as well so all the big labs for all intents and purposes publicly whether they're actually going to do this or not say yep let's slow down AI development now is this kind of a PR stunt like in my personal opinion I don't actually believe any of them are going to slow down development maybe they'll slow down when they roll out models with they'll slow down how they talk about models but like none of them want to get left behind by the other companies so I'm sure they all just like pile on to the in my opinion they're all piling on to this let's slow down because it's you know good PR makes them seem responsible and they're just going to keep developing stuff probably as fast as the can stay competitive okay who is not slowing down well publicly China's newspaper has called this whole push from an

4:30Anthropic and everyone else in America a cold war tactic Beijing's official press is freeing the Anthropic Safety Advocacy as a US strategy to hobble Chinese AI development and they say look we're not going to be involved in anything to do with slowing down AI because we think you guys are just trying to slow us down so not listening so that's kind of the first big thing that's come out China is not slowing down so if the US firms do slow down and China becomes the leader they've essentially handed that over now some would argue this is a major economic disadvantage that's certainly the argument that's being made from the top political figures in the United States Trump recently came out and tweeted and I'll like I'll give you the first and bottom half of his tweet and I'll skip out some of the funny bits in the middle but he says concerning AI when in history of business did anyone see the leaders of an industry call for regulation that if strongly implemented will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy AI taking over the world destroying humanity and all the other bad things is a hoax he then says all of these hoaxes

5:36that Americans were forced to endure through deconstructionists and deviance foul play in illegal conduct president she of china just announced that china will be doing absolutely nothing to stand in the way of AI or its future google has recently stated that they plan to build a massive plant in Finland all because they are finding permitting too difficult in the United States I'm not happy about that and want them to change their mind or they're thinking AI and data centers will be the greatest economic deployment engine in history bigger than oil gold diamonds or even the internet it will not be stopped by brilliantly run destructive forces during the term of president don't know which is Trump okay so trump is coming out and saying you know basically he's not going to because the way that a lot of this is going and I we've seen some interesting tweets from the former a i zard david sacks he said he recently tweeted out and said he's like if open AI and anthropic say they want to slow down AI development might he's like might take us maybe you think it's controversial but I say go for it slow it down if you want no one is stopping you but what I don't want you to do

6:37is request regulatory regulatory force so that every other AI company is going to have to slow down the development of their model so you know by all means if they want to slow down go for it but the problem is that the lobbying from them and the what they what they're advocating and their posts and stuff is that they would like everyone to be forcibly slowed down inside of the United States and obviously China's not going to do that so a lot of people economically see this as a big issue and then we also recently just had a zuckerberg come out and say that AI development needs to move faster so zuckerberg traditionally very on the you know has donated heavily to democratic candidates and it's kind of been in that camp has moved over into all the sudden this you know he's aligned with trump or it's really not a conservative versus you know liberal thing at this point in my opinion but he's kind of moving over that that camp which is really interesting because we have Elon and everyone else saying to slow it down Elon also obviously is Republican you know campaign for Trump and Trump is saying don't slow down Elon saying slow down is that is Mark Zuckerberg who donated to

7:41jubaid in the same right so it's like these political forces are all switching sides which is just so fascinating at the same time we have Yanlecon who literally left X because he doesn't like Elon because he's conservative and Yanlecon is very liberal and there's all the drama in the in the backstory of like that Yanlecon says right Dario was already claiming that GPT2 was too dangerous to open source back in 2019 I made fun of of them then everyone should be making fun of them now we also have we also have many other like I think prominent conservatives that are going over and saying they're going over with Bernie Sanders and announcing that they would like to slow down development so it feels like it's not super political although we do have Trump saying that doesn't want to slow down but I think from probably just an economic perspective he doesn't want you know the stock market to crash and which basically if we look at the last few years the stock market has been held up by a lot of the biggest AI firms outperforming Nvidia etc and so obviously Trump doesn't want that to slow down it's getting better for the economy we're seeing a lot of switching of sides here and a lot of different people and Yanlecon is saying do not

8:44slow down make fun of Dario and everyone else now Elon publicly said slow it down which is interesting and a lot of people then you know are asking okay well what can we even expect X AI to be building someone said apart from GROC 4.7 what are we expecting from SpaceX in September and Elon said GROC 4.8 which is a 2.5 terabyte model trained with our new C++ software stack will finish training this week and start reinforcement learning someone commented on that and said sounds like slowing down is going well and this is kind of what I'm getting at Elon said slow down but they're releasing they're getting ready to release their brand new model it seems like they're going to break next speeds I don't believe any of these people are actually slowing down even if they say that they're slowing down and it kind of reminds me of Elon if you guys will all remember you know not to throw like shader anything but like when open AI was crushing it with I think GPT 4.5 Elon Elon sign a letter with like 100 other AI experts that was like you know GPT 4.5 is too powerful when you just slow down the French remodels they don't get much better because it's dangerous for society blah blah blah and at the same time as he was doing that he was going and starting X AI and getting it all off the ground so it just feels like he was like look that guy's ahead slow down so we can catch up

9:49it's kind of the same thing right now GROC isn't the number one top tier model right now that belongs to open AI and then probably an ferrofic is number two and so it feels like GROC is you know we just throwing it in the ring to okay fine everyone slow down a little bit we can catch up that's my vibe on all of on all of that here's something that's interesting though we're actually seeing some interesting statistics I saw a great post by Kremio over on X and he said the electrical prices just keep getting better and better for Georgians Georgia power announced that new large load contracts overwhelmingly data centers will save their customers nearly a billion dollars erasing about 180 dollars per year from their bills so a lot of people have complained about prices of electricity going up new to data centers and and I think that that is fair however I think because of that there's been a lot of pushback and a lot of different industries and people are now requiring data centers anyone doing these new buildouts instead of getting subsidies to pay extra and to pay more and they're paying for these large load contracts they have to pay extra for it and because of that

10:49the people around the data centers are seeing their bills actually drop we're actually seeing this in a bunch of different places along with many people being encouraged to go and post you know go and create their own energy production plants next to the data centers to power them so they're not pulling off of the grid this is also happening in a lot of places so I recently had someone ask me and I posted a screenshot of this over on LinkedIn but I had someone recently asked me you know they said how do you not have a ton of AI crash outs and they're like talking about the future they said that their TikTok is very doomsday to what I replied was that I think this is a very strong side up it's technology that can find you know a cure to cancer and most diseases we had Dario say that in five to ten years you think most diseases and cancer could be cured with the technology and so obviously China isn't going to slow down if I believe America needs to accelerate if anything and they need to do good with what they're able to create yes we need to have perhaps good guard rails on it yes we need to do some of these great systems where you know data centers are forced to do closed water systems so there's not all the steam and water waste getting evaporated if you keep it closed then it essentially eliminates water

11:49waste issues and we need to have it so that they pay extra for their electricity sure if that's what we want to do it or we can have it so they generate their own electricity rate there are these genuine complaints about maybe the industry or the infrastructure so fix those complaints don't just say we're going to stop AI like they get at the good thing that we're all getting out of this and they just like go to the base and try to like cobble all the data centers and cobble all the AI providers make people do it more responsibly make them spend more money I recently had a great comment on another post where they were essentially saying that instead of instead of just deleting you know all of this all of these different data centers and cobbling them is slowing them down just make them or all of these AI model providers make them spend more money on alignment right and I think we've seen over the last few years open AI and I thought for a lot of them used to spend more time and more attention on alignment before putting out a model and eventually it just got so cut through they're trying to release their models faster faster and because of that then all of a sudden that that kind of became a byproduct right and now we have a lot of people complaining about it but the biggest complaint isn't even coming from people so much as like open AI and

12:52anthropic are releasing these things saying that they're super dangerous and and so it feels like it's coming from inside of their companies now if this is true there's a great solution they could just spend more time red teaming more time doing alignment and more time fixing the models internally and if they want to slow down they can slow down but I don't think we should have them forcing people okay this gets to part two of this why is this going on why are they saying this and I think I'm a prob talk was been podcast before but there's been some interesting new tweets that I've seen recently which is essentially getting to the point where and the accusation I think that's leveled and I feel like I've got some good confirmation of this is that at the end of the day they would like to ban open source models that's I mean whether they're saying that out loud or not this is the goal right they're like look we need all of this to be regulated you can't regulate open source models because it's not coming through an API so people could take it and do anything with it and we even had Sam Altman he has like an alt account on x that he posts from and on his alt account he you know it kind of says things that he can't say from his main account but he was responding to people and saying he believes that open source models will be banned and he said that

13:56that's great that those models should be put on APIs where they belong so Sam Altman is saying the quiet paragraph allowed he believes that going along with this which he's going along with it and he's endorsing this path is going to lead to open source models getting banned which obviously it would be terrible for the bottom line of what the banning would be great for him and for Dario but it would be terrible for the bottom line of anthropic and open AI if all the biggest firms are just using open source models there was a report that one of the biggest law firms in America you know making billions of dollars a year has decided that they're going to run an open source model they bought an massive shipment of GPUs from Nvidia to run their own open source model reinforcement learning done on their own data the open and the topic don't have access to with all of the cases all of the contracts everything they've done in their past so they can run their own open source model essentially on on prem and they don't need to pay anthropic and open AI a dime in order to do that that's obviously a massive threat to this entire industry and this entire business model of Dario and anthropic and and open AI and so this is what I believe they're they're attempting to to ban and

15:02to stall and to get out to get out of circulation is all these open source models which I mean it's interesting because open AI has released some really impressive great open source models they've done some good to the whole community by doing that it's kind of like they've bought a lot of good will in doing that but at the same time you can see why they move from an open source non-profit to a for-profit closed source right it's obviously much more profitable to do it this way in all of the follow from this Sam Altman has recently went on and said that he is not planning an IPO for open AI in 2026 is going to be waiting probably till 2027 and yet andthropics has picked the NASDAQ as the place where they're going to IPO so it doesn't feel like they are pacing the frontier when it comes to their IPO and they're going to go public sooner than later I think so it's very interesting to hear a lot of these companies talk the talk and maybe not walk the lock but we'll see what happens with all of this guys thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today I hope this was interesting if you watched over on video you saw all of the screenshots I was sharing along the way of different tweets and different news articles and that I'm sharing all of this if you're listening on Apple

16:06you can watch this all on video now I publish this all on video on Apple thank you so much for tuning in and I will catch you guys all in the next episode make sure as always you go check out aibox.ai if you want to get access to the 90 top AI models all in one place for $9 there's so many incredible things you can do I'll see you guys all in the next episode